How do we engage with our environment?

Begin where you are, here on the Pitzer Campus, right under your feet, with these sidewalks, gardens, buildings, and grassy mounds. But don’t imagine that this just requires that you “look” or pay attention in a more “ecological” manner -- the world around us is not there simply to be observed. We are always in the middle of things; participation is our only option. The Pitzer Multi-Species Commons project is an attempt to foster this participation in the most direct and immediate manner possible via foraging.
What does this mean? Start feeling and connecting to your local ecology by emulating other animals: join with our fellow species and bend down to eat what is underfoot. When we eat what is growing on the Pitzer Campus what has happened to it now happens to us. Our health and its health are linked. Its concerns and ours meet. We can no longer separate our fates -- we have become intra-dependent. As you pick this plant, you are not alone -- you have to work across species. This means forming a multi-species community based on shared pleasures, curiosities, and concerns. This is the beginning of something new that is both urgent and joyous. Share with others what you forage and celebrate the bounty all around us.

Suggestions for using:

GET OUT THERE:

Walk your campus – look down, stop, and get down into the plants.

Identify & track: plants, animals, interactions, & patterns (there is a brief foraging guide on this site and there are books in the kitchen to help you. Also there are many great books, apps and web sites – sleuth around.)

Tell others about it. write up a recipe or notes (put on chalkboards, add to web, make a zine)

Become every day more and more directly dependent on other species. Fold into the food systems around you.

Generalize the practice of foraging to all aspects of your life

Use processes, forces and capacities of abundance.

Work via consensus, & generosity.

MAKE THINGS COMMON:

Refuse forms of scarcity, privatization, and enclosure - all those professional monopolies over everyday life: building, growing, health, work, military and education.

Shift from having to doing: HAVING: Our everyday lives are primarily focused on resources, individuals, & needs. This shapes our engagements into questions of having (ownership & rights). Solutions appear as things to have: commodities, knowledge, or services. This is part of an individualistic entrepreneur-consumer outlook, which fosters decreased cooperation, trust & accountability in all of us.

DOING: We wish to foster the realization that we are actively of a world (doing). We’re already engaged with dynamic fields & processes. As you fuse your health with the dandelions, you become focused on making and unmaking patterns, networks, assemblages, and communities. In moving from having to a worldly doing we actively make things common.